The American Society of Civil Engineers released its latest infrastructure report card for Louisiana, and the results are exactly what anyone who lives here would expect: blatantly below average.
Louisiana earned a C- minus overall, with roads and drinking water at a D, bridges at a D+, and no category rising above a C+. It’s technically an improvement from the D+ the state received in 2017, but the engineers are blunt: our infrastructure is breaking faster than we are fixing it.
What Improved, What Got Worse?
A few categories, like aviation, coastal protection, drinking water all ticked upward compared to 2017. The improvements are largely due to federal dollars from recent infrastructure and stimulus packages that funded long-delayed projects.
Unfortunately, other items slipped, and the grades aren’t just academic. Let’s translate letter grades into lived reality:
Roads: D.
Chronic potholes, rutted rural highways, and urban arterials that chew up suspensions. Congestion is so bad it costs Louisiana drivers an estimated $4.1 billion a year in wasted time and fuel. Baton Rouge drivers lose about 64 hours a year to congestion, New Orleans 52 hours, Lafayette 32 hours. That is more than a workweek per driver sitting in traffic, which is more than a simple inconvenience — it’s reduced productivity, higher logistics costs, and a drag on economic competitiveness.
Drinking water: D.
Aging pipes, frequent leaks, and too many boil-water advisories. Even a short-duration advisory can impose hundreds of thousands of dollars in aggregate across households and businesses. Over time, recurrent advisories contribute to erosion of trust, higher insurance/borrowing premiums for public utilities, and slower economic development.
Bridges: D+.
More than one in ten of our nearly 12,700 bridges are rated “poor,” almost double the national rate. The number in “good” condition is shrinking. The rest are drifting into the purgatory of “fair,” the category right before “closed.”
Residents feel these poor grades when a bridge shuts down unexpectedly and suddenly a 20-minute hop turns into a 60-minute detour. Or when road construction drags on for years because the state is juggling a massive backlog with not enough money and rapidly rising material costs.
For a state that markets itself as the logistics and energy backbone of the Gulf South, “mediocre and at risk” is not a flex.
Extreme Weather is Exposing all the Cracks
Louisiana has taken a beating: 36 extreme weather events in the past decade, causing about $200 billion in damages. Our roads, drainage, levees, ports, and water systems weren’t designed to meet standards in a changing climate, i.e. stronger storms, more heat, rapid land loss.
Instead of becoming more serious about infrastructure maintenance, we been underfunding it for decades.
Consider the gas tax. Louisiana still relies on a 20-cent state gas tax last raised in 1989. Its purchasing power has collapsed by roughly two-thirds because cars use less fuel and more drivers switch to EVs. Meanwhile, we’re juggling one of the largest road networks in the country with a $33 billion backlog and growing.
Coastal protection is another perfect example. The state spends more than $1.6 billion a year on projects meant to buffer 2 million coastal residents and critical oil and gas infrastructure. Vital work hampered by limited budgets that can’t outrun land loss, sea-level rise, and the expiration of BP settlement dollars coming in just six years.
These example capture the underlying tension in the report: incremental improvements are happening, but climate pressure is increasing faster than budgets and construction timelines.
The Core Message of the Report
Here’s the truth the engineers didn’t say directly but the grades imply clearly:
We accept performance from our infrastructure that we would never tolerate from any system responsible for our personal safety.
If a surgeon told you they passed medical school with a C- minus, would you let them operate on your heart? But every day, we drive over D+ bridges, rely on D-rated drinking water systems, and count on C- minus levees to hold us through the next storm. Risky infrastructure and slum lord maintenance has been normalized.
And until that changes, our grades won’t improve. The engineers behind this report recommended that we use our limited finding both selectively and strategically. A more resilient Louisiana looks like this:
Maintenance first, glamour later.
Fix the stuff we already have before we add new lanes, new flyovers, and new promises. A bridge in “fair” condition today is a future closure if we starve maintenance to chase something more politically exciting.
Modernize how we pay for infrastructure.
A flat 20-cent gas tax in a world of EVs and efficient cars is a slow bleed. Other states have:
- Indexed gas taxes to inflation
- Added modest EV and hybrid fees
- Used local option taxes for specific projects
Use data to decide what to save first.
The report calls out a lack of good data on where resilience investments deliver the biggest payoff. That is not a minor footnote. If we do not understand which bridges, roads, and water systems are truly critical, we will keep spreading dollars thin and hoping for the best.
Align infrastructure with climate reality.We are not going back to a world of rare storms and predictable rainfall. Design standards, construction timelines, and investment priorities have to assume more heat, more water, and more volatility. That applies to roads, bridges, drinking water, sewage, and the electric grid.
Resilience New Orleans focuses on energy policy, but grid resilience does not exist in a vacuum.
- Lineworkers cannot restore power if bridges are unsafe or closed.
- Hospitals cannot function during an outage if their backup fuel and staff cannot reach them.
- Neighborhood-scale microgrids and distributed energy resources still depend on roads, drainage, and communications to serve people in a crisis.
When state and local leaders talk about “hardening the grid,” they need to be talking about the entire physical system we live in, not just poles and wires. For New Orleans specifically, that means:
- The City Council, as utility regulator, needs to demand that Entergy’s grid plans line up with broader infrastructure and climate risks, not just short-term cost recovery.
- State legislators need to stop treating infrastructure revenue as a political third rail and start treating it as the foundation of economic competitiveness.
- Regional planning bodies should be aligning transportation, flood protection, and energy investments instead of treating them as separate worlds.
Your levee, your evacuation route, your local clinic, your substation, and your broadband line all live in the same physical world. If any one of them fails at the wrong time, the others suffer too, and the consequences hurt all of us.
Resilience is not magic and it is not free. It is a choice to fund maintenance, to modernize revenue, to use data instead of wishful thinking, and to plan for the climate we actually live in.
Louisiana has some of the toughest, most resilient people in the country. The ASCE is right: our infrastructure should be at least as strong as the people it serves. Right now, it isn’t.